A new mission for NY’s schools

Our opinion: A more holistic approach to education and poverty would be a solid investment in the future of New York and its children.

Over the next few weeks, lawmakers and Gov. Andrew Cuomo will work to craft a spending plan that includes aid to New York’s school districts.

This plan needs to be about more than education. If New York is going to truly give its youngest citizens their best possible shot at rewarding, productive lives, the governor and lawmakers must envision this as a plan to make a serious dent in poverty.

We saw some glimpses of how poverty and education are linked in a trio of profiles of Albany families Sunday by Times Union reporter Scott Waldman. One striking common thread was that all three families were headed by single mothers, a key factor in poverty in America. According to the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, poverty rates are highest in single-mom families — nearly one in three are poor — and particularly if the woman is black or Hispanic. And as we saw in one of those Albany families, there’s often a cycle at work — one of the students, whose mother had her at 16, is now 16 and pregnant herself. Every day her mother struggles to get her to go to school.

Each of those stories may be about one child and one family, but collectively they are about us all. They’re about a system of education that Mr. Cuomo notes is the most expensive in the nation but which fails, at least by some measures, to be the best. They’re about the country’s most costliest Medicaid program. They’re about a Family Court system that Albany Family Court Judge W. Dennis Duggan observes is full of children from low-wage, single-mother families from which the fathers are absent.

To his credit, Mr. Cuomo did seem to have poverty very much in mind in drafting his executive budget. He wants New York students to spend more time in school, and offers districts competitive grants to achieve it. An initiative in Massachusetts to provide more instructional hours, he notes, resulted in higher test scores among students in 19 high-needs districts.

He also wants to provide funds for districts with high poverty rates to provide full-day pre-K programs. Such early education has been shown to give children a leg up on learning, at least in their first years of elementary school.

And the governor, following up on a recommendation of his education reform commission, is looking to promote “community school” programs in poorer districts. The programs would use schools as “hubs” that integrate both learning and social service programs.

This more holistic approach to not just educating children but helping them deal with the problems that poverty adds to their lives sounds like a smarter approach than simply throwing more money at the problem. In Cincinnati, for instance, test scores and graduation rates have been rising since community schools were introduced.

At the same time, however, Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature can’t ignore the reality that too many high-needs districts do not get a proper share of the $21 billion the state spends on public education. The governor and lawmakers must at least begin to bring funding for poorer school districts up to par. And yes, that’s going to require smaller increases, or none at all, in some wealthier districts. There will undoubtedly be some disgruntled taxpayers and legislators.

But considering the payoff — saving untold thousands of children, and perhaps cutting, in the long run, the vast social costs of poverty — it would be a more than fair trade.

5 Responses

Single Mothers are the problem….. Well perhaps then we should have some classes in our schools that teach what a family is and why it is important. We also need to stop enabling these people to live poor.

The poverty issue goes much deeper than the Governor is suggesting. Poor communities do not offer the same programs as wealthier districts and poorer families do not value education as much since they need the person to work instead to make ends meet. Problem is today even getting a college education means nothing but debt. What value is there to an education that gets you nothing more? A good measure of the relative wealth of a community is Free and Reduced Priced Lunch participation rates. Education does not open doors anymore…just connections and friends do.

Naturally, a single-mother household is going to have less money than a husband and wife household as it has one less worker.

Yes, there are many single-mother households on wellfare, but they are not the only ones and it’s not even close to all signle mothers.

One thing that would help is if we actually persued truancy in Albany along with the ticketing and fees associated.

Truancy in Albany is around 75%! We have too many “guardians” that don’t bother to send their charges to school and they need to be punished for taking away the child’s right to an education. The only way to improve the poverty situation is to provide an education to the youth that enables them to get good jobs and be productive members of society.

Send out the cops to serve truancy notices and to collect the kids and send them to school. That would actually be a good use of funds.